Spiders in Sutton Massachusetts

Eight Legged Friends
Spiders are wonderful creatures, full of beauty and talent. Spiders catch bugs for us. Spiders eat annoying flying gnats. We should all treasure and appreciate spiders. Many Native American cultures have wonderful stories about spiders and how they help nature. Massachusetts spiders are our friends :)

In biologic terms, spiders are of the order Araneae. They all have eight legs. There are over 40,000 different species of spiders. Finding any book that shows "all spiders" is literally impossible! That's why I'm trying to focus on one area - just the Massachusetts spiders I've found in Sutton. You have to catch them when you can - most spiders only live for 1-2 years.

Some of these spiders below are common spiders of Massachusetts. For example, we see orb weavers with their brilliant spiral webs all the time, and most school children would identify orb weaver webs as being spider webs. On the other hand, we've only seen the stripey ground crab spider once!